Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics—A Collection of Written Interviews

5. Some Real Mothers...:The SF Eye Interview

5, Some Real Mothers . . . : The SF Eye Interview This text began as an interview conducted and recorded by Takayuki Tatsumi at Lunacon , in Croton, New York, in April 198"]. I rewrote the transcription over the next month. It waspublished in a 1987 issue of Science Fiction Eye (Volume i, Number 3), edited by Stephen P. Brown out of Washington, D. C. The interview is dedicated to the memory of Alfred Bester (igij-igSj) Takayuki Tatsumi: Let me begin with a brief introduction. Last autumn [1986] it was very exciting to watch you teach science fiction— especially the cyberpunk writers—at Cornell University,where you were a senior fellow at Cornell's Society for the Humanities, and I had a chance to sit in on your seminar. Chiefly, you focused on a comparison ofJohn Varleyand William Gibson, along with a psychoanalytic reading of their works, giving us an insight into what's going on in the current history of science fiction. Today I'd like to discuss with you your thoughts on cyberpunk, and SF after cyberpunk, based on your experiences at Cornell. To begin with, let me ask you, how did you like Cornell ? Samuel R. Delany: Well, it was a wonderful experience. It gave me a chance to talk about some ideas that had been percolating down for a year or more. Also, it was just a chance to think. Paradoxically, the one thing that professional writers—writers who earn their living from their work—are not encouraged to do is think. I don't mean thinking about your work—how to make it better; howa sentence might be interpreted; how a story might be read; what you can use in everything from your afternoon walk by the grocery to the TV Some Real Mothers . . . 765 movie you catch at three in the morning. That's the waya hunter thinks about hunting, or a dry cleaner thinks about cleaning fluids. It has too much the mark of necessity and survival. I mean thinking as an abstract process, where, in a social situation, problems—or even situations—are put before you, and, in discussion or alone, you're encouraged just to think about them. Since I've come back [from Cornell], I've finished one long story (or short novel), "The Tale of Rumor and Desire," that is part of a new Neveryon book, Returnto Neveryon. I couldn't tell you directly how much of the Cornell experience went into it. The landscape did. There's one scene in a gorge, which is primarily one of the Ithaca gorges (at Treeman Park) transformed a bit. TT: The influence of landscape upon literature isvery intriguing. However , J. G. Ballard's "inner space" seems quite different from Gibson's "cyberspace"; Ballard's springs from his own experience in China; cyberspace functions both as the product of a high-tech imagination and as the playground for a certain stylistic experimentation. In this sense you were right when, in class, you compared Gibson's cyberspace to Alfred Bester's typographic experiments that configured Gully Foyle's synesthesia while he space-time jaunted in The Stars My Destination. Could you tell me a litde bit more about the relationship between scientific idea and science fictional style? SRD: My first thought, when you bring this up, is not so much a stylistic one as a formal one. Science fiction has often taken new areas of conceptual space, then inflated them with language. The very first turning to outer space as a real place to write about, by Leinster, Heinlein, Williamson, and Van Vogt, was very much the same verbal strategy. Suddenly there was a new space to deal with. Then you inject a great deal of lyrical language into this particular area and see whathappens to it, happens in it. And that's what Gibson is doing with cyberspace . . . it's a similar strategic move. A thought on form, but it has its stylistic aspect—it makes a stylistic distinction. TT: Did that have anything to do with your selection of the Robert Heinlein and Roger Zelazny stories for your seminar? SRD: No, this is actuallya pretty new idea to me. It's not one I've spent a lot of time thinking about. The selection of the Zelazny and Heinlein stories had to do with their approach to psychoanalysis—the use of 166 Parti psychoanalysis in Heinlein's "The Roads MustRoll"and in...